Improving Slavery's Border: Nature, Navigation, and Regionalism on the Ohio River

In 1849, an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln applied for a patent for a device for "Buoying Vessels Over Shoals." The invention placed inflatable bellows on either side of a steamboat for the purpose of boosting the hull over underwater obstructions, upon which "the ship is expected to float lightly and gaily over the shoal which would otherwise have proved a serious interruption to her voyage." Lincoln's novel idea sprung from his personal experience navigating shallow waters on the Mississippi River and its tributaries as a young man. Unfortunately his "quaint conception" did not catch on, leaving Abe to find notoriety in other ventures.¹ The only president to hold a patent, his invention for improving river navigation is among the most curious of his accomplishments and rarely merits serious attention in his countless biographies. However, Lincoln's patent becomes less quirky when considering the region from which he hailed. Born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and eventually landing in Illinois, Lincoln's entire pre-presidential life gravitated around the Ohio River. Like most westerners in the early nineteenth century, the rhythms of his day-to-day existence were tied to that river's ability to facilitate trade and communication. Lincoln's invention sought and failed to remedy a very serious concern that weighed heavily on his contemporaries' minds: that rivers in the Ohio Valley frequently dried up, leaving people stranded, stuck on a sandbar, or sunk.

When most historians study the Ohio River during the antebellum period, it is usually as a slave border. This is not an incorrect perception, since the Ohio River was the longest contiguous slave boundary in the United States. Spanning from Pennsylvania to Missouri, cities and towns along the Ohio were host to the vigilantism of belligerent abolitionists and slave catchers alike.² Yet points along this river boundary were also the natural confluences for trade among adjoining states. The westward flow of the Ohio River quite literally pulled a diverse lot of Yankees, Virginians, Native Americans, enslaved African Americans, and European immigrants into the same border space. The bustling trade on the river's edge produced a commercial frenzy of human motion, which drew people together and muddied legal differences on slavery. When the Ohio River dried up, as it often did in the early nineteenth century, commerce in these burgeoning river cities ground to a virtual standstill. People felt the impact of a low, unnavigable river on their pocketbooks regardless of whether they stood on the north or south bank of the Ohio.

Efforts to improve navigation on the Ohio River united residents across state lines and served to counter heightening sectional tensions. The Ohio River was both the primary transportation corridor in the early American West and extremely unpredictable. Compared to the deeper waters of the lower Mississippi, the Ohio River was generally navigable by steamboats for only six months per year. Merchants, artisans, and laborers tied to river trade sought to transform their chaotic natural river into a reliable transportation network by deepening channels and removing nettlesome rocks and sunken trees. The failure of both private enterprise and antebellum governments to realize that vision of bringing human order to the Ohio River bred a sentiment of shared frustration and common cause across this slave boundary.

In fact, before the Civil War, many residents of the Ohio Valley identified as "westerners" instead of as northerners or southerners. Westerners embraced the economic diversity of the Ohio Valley and consciously eschewed association with the growing national rift on slavery. Matthew Salafia, Christopher Phillips, Bridget Ford, and other historians have argued that a shared borderland mentality emerged in the Ohio Valley in the antebellum era despite the divide over slavery.³ Yet, most studies centered on the Ohio River boundary skip over the river in favor of events on dry land. The invention of steamboats liberated people from the vagaries of wind and current, facilitating greater commerce and prosperity across the western expanse. However, on one of the nation's most important highways, nature still held sway. Local efforts to make...